CEC plans power outages

The final phase of a multi-year project to upgrade electricity transmission service to the western portion of Central Electric Cooperative's service area will be completed Oct. 12. Two planned outages are required so the final part of the project can be completed safely and quickly. The first outage will last 10 to 30 minutes on Monday, Oct. 10, between 10 a.m. and noon, and will affect approximately 1,100 co-op members served by the Tollgate substation. This affects the Tollgate, Buck Run and Crossroads subdivisions and a small number of members in adjacent areas. These members will not be affected by the Oct. 11 and 12 outage. The second outage will take place at 10 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, and last until approximately 6 a.m., Wednesday, Oct. 12. It will affect approximately 1,800 CEC members in Black Butte Ranch and Camp Sherman and Suttle Lake areas. These accounts will not be affected by the previous day's outage. CEC members affected by the outages were notified by mail Sept. 23. "This project brings to a close a long-term effort to upgrade the transmission system in the area which will enable us to feed each of three substations from different directions," said Bob McConnell, CEC operations manager. "Because we've had a combination of 69,000-volt and 115,000-volt service, we have not had the capability to feed power from a different direction when a section of the system was knocked out of service by a storm, vehicle accident or some other cause," he said. "Once we complete this final step, we should rarely, if ever, have a repeat of the kind of outage in the western area like the one we experienced Sept. 24, when an accident took one of our transmission poles out of service," McConnell said. CEC will post any changes or updates during the planned outages to its Outage Center at www.cec.coop.